Secondly, your wrist would be an awful place to put this. It restricts movement of one of you most mobile joints and try typing with that strapped where they put it. The ideal place is where you've got lots of capillaries close to the skin. The ears or parts of the face and head come to mind.

It's 'an apparent' temp change. Ok, so maybe useful in office settings for people who are sweating or freezing to adjust themselves a bit without having to spend the power to change the thermal in the building.

It's 'an apparent' temp change. Ok, so maybe useful in office settings for people who are sweating or freezing to adjust themselves a bit without having to spend the power to change the thermal in the building.

Employee #1 Old mr. Jenkins is such a tight-wad. It's 97 degrees in here and he won't turn on the A/C.Employee #2: No big deal, with my Wristify® I feel like it's only 94 degrees!

The Peltier effect is real. The idea is to use electrical power to transmit heat from one side of an object to other side of the object. The problem is that Peltier cooling is horribly inefficient compared to standard air conditioning. Normally Peltier cooling is restricted to specialized applications where the conditions do not allow for standard cooling techniques.Peltier cooling for humans has been tried before. I think there were some prototypes built into chairs at one point (the back of the chair got hot).Until someone gets the efficiency up it will remain a specialty application.

So, a Peltier and an aluminum heat sink from China bought on ePay and an Arduino.

I have similar plans for a cooled seat cover to go in my classic cars, except it's liquid to liquid. Much easier than A/C installation when it's only me driving most of the time and doesn't have to be terribly cold, just take the edge off on hot days.

For personal cooling, the misters or the vests already sold that leverage a small pump in an ice cooler you wear on you are the way to go. Until they get solid-state cooling to be a lot closer to phase transition. The Peltiers just suck too much power.

Anyhow, neck cooling is the more practical approach. Peltiers are a biatch to make in any appreciable size.

Next week: MIT students, using Peltiers, come up with way your body heat could charge your cell phone.

/fark, if I had the seed money I could get rid of the alternator from the conventional auto.

There has been some research on using tapping the heat flux through an object and generating electrical power from it. It is very inefficient at this time and the temperature differential has to be pretty high. Last I knew there was some research in using it on cat exhausts.

A lot of haters, most of you ignorant of that one Discovery Channel show I watched about it that explained some of this but also let's say SCIENCE, and yet the one actual obvious problem goes uncommented on.

First, what's right:

• Yes, this works--both physiologically and psychologically. You feel cooler, you are (fractionally) cooler.• Yes, the wrist is a perfectly reasonable place to put this. It's not the only area of your body with a lot of blood vessels near the skin, but you don't need to cool every molecule in your bloodstream for this to work.• It even works in reverse: you can keep people in wetsuits alive and comfortable in water temperatures that would kill them dead just by circulating hot water from above through a glove. It only heats the blood passing by the hand, but that's enough.• The hot air coming off the other side isn't in any real thermal contact with your body and won't heat you back up. It might be annoying, though. Maybe the fashion will be to start wearing clothing with built-in vanes.

Unfortunately, I don't see something like this working for more than a few minutes without giant farking batteries, as the Peltier effect is not really all that efficient. But that's only a problem if you need to wear it around. What about a nice cooling chair* that you can plug into the wall?

Elfich:The Peltier effect is real. The idea is to use electrical power to transmit heat from one side of an object to other side of the object. The problem is that Peltier cooling is horribly inefficient compared to standard air conditioning. Normally Peltier cooling is restricted to specialized applications where the conditions do not allow for standard cooling techniques.Peltier cooling for humans has been tried before. I think there were some prototypes built into chairs at one point (the back of the chair got hot).Until someone gets the efficiency up it will remain a specialty application.

Of course it's real, just look at any wine cooler out there.

The problem here is that the headline is misleading. This wouldn't do much to actually cool you, but would make you feel cooler. Doesn't seem practical at all though.

ummm... sorry ... but I bought a device like this about 15 years ago from the Sharper Image catalog. The ONLY difference was that it was designed to be worn on the back of the neck instead of the wrist. You find out very quickly that you sweat all over your body for a very good reason: it evaporates and cools you down all over. If it were better to "supercool" one small spot then I think we would have evolved with such a system. Time is pretty smart.